Ask HN: What to do when your side-project takes off? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What to do when your side-project takes off?

7 pointsamerf111 comments

Very curious to know how things change when you have hyper growth. How do you deal with priorities? Do you reach out to get seed-funding? Who do you speak to? Do you sell?

I am asking because I read a lot of stories of people getting #1 on HN or PH and suddenly their servers are down because of heavy traffic. What do you do after that? It seems super crazy

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For B2B, HN and PH users rarely convert, so you would do nothing, because it's not "taking off" -- it's being flooded with tire-kickers. I think people put too much focus on launching on HN, Reddit, PH, etc. And you also shouldn't expect "hyper growth." I went nearly a year without a paying customer. Growth is a slow thing, not an overnight thing (I know, I know, you hear about these romanticized stories a lot and it's hard not to expect it for yourself). Expecting hyper growth from these channels will result in you giving up early due to unrealistic expectations of bad marketing channels. You're not going to get seed funding because you got a sudden spike in bad traffic.

For B2C, I'm not sure on conversion rates, so I won't comment on that.

The death hugs I have seen have usually been products that are on shared hosting, which is never a good thing, even when testing an idea. The few that are hosted somewhere like DigitalOcean or Linode, they didn't scale the VM before getting hugged.

Based on the small handful of times a post of mine has hit #5 or higher, you can expect between 20k and 40k visits. How many conversions you get completely depend on your product.

My blog has had 4 posts that have taken top marks. A total of 150k visits (during those days) and I have had 0 newsletter signups, 0 contact form submissions, $0 in advertising revenue, and $0 in attributed business.

You know its funny this reminds me of one of the videos I posted on YouTube which went viral and got 2 million views ($0 from advertising)

I never get how this happens. Putting your website behind Cloudflare is easy as pie and it works amazingly well, even on the free plan. when traffic is rapidly increasing you can just forcefully cache all your pages and handle these hugs of death without going down.

It's a "good problem". At that point it's easier to raise money at a good valuation.

Everyone is energized. Strap on, put it the fires. If you did your architecture right (e.g. put it somewhere like AWS), scaling up the servers is no problem.

We were so energized that we built the whole customer management system in one day, something that takes others weeks to build.

If this is happening, customers usually need whatever you're selling and are much more fault tolerant. At peak, we had 10 crashed a day per user. But it was a good sign that they kept logging on despite the crashes. If you have too many customers to handle, a rule of thumb is to deal with the latest ones first because you've likely already lost the ones who were in the queue for a week.

The biggest threat IMO is that you can actually overestimate yourself. We tried to push at a valuation that is too high, because we got our hockey stick early, but it was much more than investors were willing to take.

This is very valuable info. Never thought of focusing on the latest ones first thats a new perspective

Thank you for your post!

HN traffic is not sustainable

build a side project you think is good. Then worry about this.

I don't think OP is asking so that they can get hyper growth, they are just curious about peoples experiences.

That is correct I was mainly referring to peoples experiences

I agree with that! I was actually looking to hear other peoples experiences

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